If you felt the earth shake last Wednesday around noon PST it wasn't Mother Nature at work - it was Microsoft unveiling the third platform preview of Internet Explorer 9, which boasts a number of enhancements aimed at accelerating your web-browsing experience. 

The unveiling took place at 12 Gallery Lane, a small art gallery in San Francisco featuring the work of Hunt Slonem. Microsoft gathered here with several hardware partners to show off IE 9's new capabilities. NVIDIA and AMD where there (on opposite sides of the room of course), along with Dell and representatives from companies such as ASUS. Dell, NVIDIA, and AMD had multiple examples of current hardware on hand to show live demonstrations of the IE 9 platform preview, which were impressive.

The main attraction is clearly IE 9's incorporation of hardware-accelerated HTML5, which leverages the GPU in your desktop, laptop, or netbook PC to speed up not only the display of images and videos, but also the playback and navigation of multimedia files. So you can quickly zoom in and out of massive panoramic images and smoothly pan around them, as well as swiftly browse through galleries of HD videos and high resolution digital still images inside your browser - just as you can natively on your own desktop. 

You can see the platform preview in action yourself right now - download it here. NVIDIA had the speed tests runing on ION- and GeForce-powered netbooks, laptops, and desktops. A desktop machine with a GTX 480 SLI setup with a tri-monitor 3D Vision Surround display topped 70,000 in the Mr. Potato Gun benchmark (what does your system score?).

It's comforting to know that the powerful graphics cards will finally be getting tapped to enhance our online experience: It's about time!